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A Gentle Reminder | London Creative Photoshoot

Mar 18
4 min read

Updated: Aug 25

London Creative Editorial Photoshoot

Sometimes, when you’ve been turning something you love into a living for long enough, it’s easy to lose sight of why you loved it before it became work. The comparison creeps in. The pressure to do more, post more, create something people will notice. Somewhere in all that noise, the reason you started can get a little harder to hear.

I think I needed something to wake that part of me back up.

I posted in a group one day with an idea for a creative photoshoot in London. There was no client attached to it, no real plan, and no reason to make it other than the fact that I wanted to see it exist.

Sim answered, and somehow that was enough. Two strangers from different parts of the world decided to make something together simply because the idea felt worth following.

I love photographing my paid clients. The people, the connection, the memories, and the chance to make someone feel beautiful and completely themselves are still the heart of why I do this. But every once in a while, I need to create alongside people who seem to speak the same strange little language—the ones who say the idea before they have time to talk themselves out of it, who aren’t afraid of too much, and who hear one thought and immediately build another on top of it.

There’s a certain energy that happens when you find people like that. Ideas start bouncing back and forth until the whole thing takes on a life of its own.

And it reminded me of something I think is easy to forget when creativity becomes your work: it isn’t something we switch on when there’s a camera in our hands or something worth posting. It existed long before any of that.

It’s part of who we are.

We walked through Southwark, stopping whenever something caught our eye and talking about life in between shots. Somehow the conversation kept circling back to the same things—the pressure of timelines, everything we’re supposed to have figured out by now, what a creative life is supposed to look like, and what we actually want once you strip away all the things we’ve been told we should want.

There’s something really comforting about saying those thoughts out loud and having someone understand them almost immediately.

That’s the part social media never really shows. Not the finished photographs, but everything happening around them: the walking, the talking, the ideas, the conversations that wander somewhere unexpected. Two women who grew up an ocean apart and somehow discovered that, in most of the ways that matter, we weren’t all that different.

We ended up on Tower Bridge, where getting the shot you want often comes down to equal parts patience and luck. Then, for a second, everything lined up. The light, the movement, the frame—and a red bus rolled through at exactly the right moment, like London had decided to cooperate.

Sim and I looked at each other and immediately knew we had it.

Those are the moments I love most. The ones you can’t fully plan or recreate, no matter how carefully you prepare. They remind me that so much of creativity is simply paying attention and being ready when something unexpected happens.

It also brought me back to that age-old question: Would you still create if no one ever saw it but you?

I think I would. But I also think there’s something meaningful about getting to share the things we make.

The harder part is remembering the difference between sharing your work and letting everything around you shape it. I see what’s trending. I see the same ideas repeated over and over, and sometimes it becomes difficult to tell what genuinely inspires you from what is quietly making you question your own work.

I think a lot of creative burnout lives somewhere in there. Not necessarily in creating too much, but in creating while constantly measuring yourself against everyone else. Somewhere along the way, you start carrying around this version of yourself who believes she isn’t original enough, productive enough, or moving quickly enough to matter.

Eventually, you have to stop making things to prove her wrong.

You have to start making them because you love making them again.


Maybe sometimes the most important thing you can do is make something for no reason other than the fact that you want it to exist.

Follow the idea before you have time to overthink it. Walk through London with a stranger who answered your post. Stop when the light looks good. Talk about the parts of life neither of you has quite figured out yet. Let the day become whatever it wants to become.

And let it remind you that you’re not the only one who feels this way.

I don’t want comparison to be the thing that slowly drains the joy out of my work. I want to trust my own eye enough that comparison starts to feel irrelevant—not because what I make is better, but because it’s mine. No one else notices the world in exactly the same way I do, and that has to be enough.

I want creating to feel like it did that day: walking, talking, noticing, making something simply because I wanted to see it exist.

For the woman who picked up the camera in the first place.

The one who finds beauty in ordinary things. Who notices the way light falls across a street and feels compelled to do something with it. Who makes something out of nothing because some part of her needs to.

And who, even if no one ever saw the work, would still keep looking for something beautiful to make.

Just for her.



 
 
 

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